Safetyism and Wokeism are fellow travelers, joined at the hip in many more contexts than not. They find their greatest purchase in the same demographics, most prominently what Charles Murray identified in Coming Apart as the “new upper class,” the elite-educated members of which “run the nation’s economic, political, and cultural institutions.” This class includes politicians and the wealthiest percentile of managers and professionals, as well as “journalists, academics, and public intellectuals in general.” Safetyism and Wokeism also originate from the members of this “new upper class” and the institutions they control, not least academia and the postmodernist leftists dominating it. And the two ideologies also share a host of characteristic features. Because bureaucratic elites’ heavy-handed response to COVID-19 is rooted in Safetyism, submission to COVID-19 Safetyism also strengthens Wokeism, even if only indirectly.
A prime feature of both Safetyism and Wokeism is the semantic inflation of safety-related terms and concepts—including, most prominently, “safety” itself. As Haidt and Lukianoff note, “In the twentieth century, the word ‘safety’ generally meant physical safety. . . . But gradually, in the twenty-first century, on some college campuses, the meaning of ‘safety’ underwent a process of ‘concept creep’ and expanded to include ‘emotional safety.’” In the case of COVID-19 Safetyism, the lines between physical safety and psychological comfort are blurred almost as frequently as in the case of Wokeism. The most glaring example of this is the infamous “wearing cloth facemask while alone outside” phenomenon, something I observe with astonishing frequency.
Other parallels are hard to miss. One of the most obvious is the institution of a novel orthodoxy, the censorship of any heterodox opinions, and the ostracism of heretics who dissent from the orthodoxy.
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